Did WoW push the bounds of the MMOG genre?

#41 David - you can remove the lid in scripts yourself by simply changing the number there. =P

As for the discussion - the point was brought up that actions and quests in MMO's are not *truly* persistant - at least not on a server or game-wide level. They are typically persistant to your character and that's the end of that.

The problem with changing this model, then, becomes one of content.

If Quest 1 has the character going out to kill Trog the Troll king who's been terrorizing a nearby village, and player 453 completes the quest, that's it... it's done.

Now, how in the world could a developer EVER hope to generate new content rapidly enough to deal with the average rate of user consumption? Times 40,000 player?

Yikes!

One idea I've had rattling around in my noggin is by making serious strides in A.I.

Basically, in our above scenario, Player 453 killed Trog the Troll king, so the "master" A.I. has to decide what the result of this is.

For one, the town is no longer terrorized and Player 453 is a hero, but what about Trog's underlings? Do they disband? Do they seek revenge on the Hero? The town?

It would become a matter of the A.I. generating new content on it's own, kind of a snowball effect.

Now, whether or not that would currently be *feasible* I'll leave to be debated by our resident A.I. gurus - I certainly don't have the knowledge to say one way or another.

Still - how fascinating would it be to build a world like that, define the major players and then just sit back and watch everything unfold before your eyes.

~ Hmmmm...

#42 One of the biggest problems I see in the world of MMOGs is that developers, while trying to create an interconnected and interactive world, try to shield players from each other. In the name of balance and anti-griefing the actions of one player are kept from adversely affecting the experience of another player. The end product is usually a very large stand-alone game in which you can go out and seek companionship if you want to.

#43

Quote:If Quest 1 has the character going out to kill Trog the Troll king who's been terrorizing a nearby village, and player 453 completes the quest, that's it... it's done.

Now, how in the world could a developer EVER hope to generate new content rapidly enough to deal with the average rate of user consumption? Times 40,000 player?

That's what I was saying before. We need to come up with better ways to generate dynamic content, and better AI to support that content.

If you're just blazing through these quests, then they shouldn't even be called quests because there is no real thought involved. Take item X here, kill Y number of [creaturename], then return for reward. That's not a quest, that's an afternoon of creating large amounts of roadkill.

Slower quests, allowing for hours of play remeniscent of a D&D campaign, so that players are not dulled by the sheer amount of missions that they need to accomplish, is what's needed, IMO. I look at it this way: I can get on an MMO and bust out 2-3 "quests" per session, lasting about 1-3 hours of play. After a week of that kind of play, I've accumulated about 15 quests. After a month: 60.

Those numbers aren't accurate, but even if you spread the monthly number over two or even three months, it's still a lot for the player to see in order to start recognizing repitition in the mission generator of your present day MMO.

That said...

Let's flip the numbers and say that a player asks for a "quest" (different than asking for a "task", or a "mission", but I'll get to that in a minute). The player is assigned a quest to find someone in another area, and bring them back home. Simple on it's face, but the player knows it's a quest, and bound to get complicated. Once the player arrives at the point where he needs to pick up the NPC to bring back, he finds out what the hitch is: The NPC has run off to another area to be with some chick. Great, now you have to go somewhere else, find this guy, and bring him back to his father, who's been waiting for a bag of onions from him for two weeks(I never said it had to make sense). Maybe the person you're talking to asks you to do something in exchange for the information. Either way, you set off for the new place, and once there, you find him, only to find out that he's got a problem: His chick's been kidnapped, and he can't get her back alone. Want to help? Of course you do, you don't log into this game for nothing! So the two of you set off to find her, and in return he agrees to come back to his father with the bag of(now moldly) onions....

I don't need to go through the whole thing-but everyone gets the point. And the fact is, stuff like that isn't super hard to come up with and break down into components once the story structure is known.

In a general sense, a story generator sounds like a huge amount to take on because of the nebulous nature of the "story" itself. A story can be anything. However, what about a story generator that generates certain types of stories, and is made to be extensible, so that as time goes on in your game, you can add new story templates and content, increasing exponentially with each addition the amount of content that is able to be created? Now a game that can do that will probably survive for a decade or so of operation, because it's no longer people blazing through a million quests that last an hour each, but people thinking and playing through a thousand quests that each take a week to finish.

#44 For starters, this is a flagrant attempt to breath new life into this discussion.

IMO MMO's are extremely repititous and relatively lifeless, which for the most part seems to be by design. I think there is more productive discussion yet to be had from this thread.

Ted, you raise good points, but I'd like to point out that what I'm suggesting isn't really a "story generator" per se', but more of a "motive engine".

The difference lies in the details.

I see a story generator as more of a list of sorts. Essentially, it is filled with possible adventure scenarios that each have certain "hooks" wherein two or more story arcs could essentially be interconnected.

This is an interesting approach, though I think it may still lead down a formulaic path in the end - even if the available formulas are considerably varied.

A "motive engine" wouldn't really put stories together, but would rather motivate the non-player characters in the world to take action. The players would then find their adventures in the opposition or support of those given motives.

I tend to work better with illustrations, so let me use my previous example to illustrate what I'm talking about.

Trog the Troll king is nothing more than an A.I. construct. He is, like the player characters, made up of stats and abilities, but additionally, he is assigned motives that he will act upon during the course of the game.

In this case, Trog's main motive is quite simply the acquisition of wealth.

No, HOW Trog is supposed to acquire that wealth is really not defined by the engine, it's more or less decided by Trog himself.

Trog surveys his surrounding and decides that, given his proximity to the local town, and its general use as a trading outpost, the best means to fulfill his motives are to raid the convoys and rob travelers going to and coming from the outpost.

He then, in support of his motive, takes his undelrings on a rampage across the outlying areas around the village, paying particular attention ot roadways and paths, as they are the most likely to result in profitable ventures.

The townsfolk inevtiably become aware of Trog and his band, and of course, would like him done away with. This would be a direct reaction brought about by the town mayors' MOTIVE to keep the economy of the town steadily growing.

As a means to that end, he then posts a bounty on Trogs head that any player wandering through town may decide to *try* and collect on.

In this scenario, the story was actually generated by two NPC's with conflicting motives, rather than the motives of the NPC's having been dictated by the story!

Now, the difference may seem semantic on the surface, but in the end, I think this would be more in the vein of a *truly* dynamic world.

Again - possible? Maybe, but at this time I'm given to doubt it due to financial and technological constraints. I could only imagine the hardware necessary to drive such thoughtful and intelligent decisions in an NPC - let alone enouhg NOPC's to populate a whole game world... but it would be very cool. =)

#45 I think we may see a breakthrough when Cryptic finishes City of Villans. If they can somehow regulate what amounts to user created content, Trog the Troll king may, in a way, become a reality.

#46 Reheheheally!?

I'm off to dredge up what technical bits I can find.

Feel free to post any links that pertain as well - I am most interested in A.I. advancement.

The day NPC's start making intelligent, motive driven actions is the day that online environments become *truly* interactive and immersive! =)

#47 @Kirby: The Troll King was a good example, but you can still break it down to a story structure applied to an NPC. But then you see my point of needing AI to support that, no matter which side of the argument you look at the example from.

@Ben: I think the user created content is somewhat of a seperate issue. Of course, it does impact the game and if you want user created content to be truly part of the game world, you should allow for your NPC's to react to it as the same as content from the "original" world, but that's about where the user content ends. Unless you mean something else like user-created NPC's?

#48 MMORPGs are fundamentally flawed, and until that flaw is fixed none of these ideas are viable. The epic quest scenario, whether it's fomr books, movies or D&D, is based on the few heroes protecting the many citizens. Heroes outnumber the rest of the populace. Honestly, WoW should have been free of evil about a week after launch.

If I kill the Troll King, he'd better be dead. And that means he shouldn't respawn in a few hours or even days. At the same time, if another baddy moves in the next day it still takes away my feeling of having made a persistent change.

This is why books, movies, etc, eventually end. You can't make use feel like we're constantly making progress while an infinite amount of opposition is still being spawned. This would be a challenge in a single player game, when you have to generate that content for 200,000 people it's ridiculous.

To accomplish what you want you cannot use the current MMORPG foundation as a starting point because it is fatally flawed.

#49

Quote:MMORPGs are fundamentally flawed, and until that flaw is fixed none of these ideas are viable.

Quote:Honestly, WoW should have been free of evil about a week after launch.

On a more basic level, I agree with you. A never-ending world is hard to have a 'one-solid-evil' to destroy; although reality tells you that it will end, the game says it doesn't. The Lord of the Rings MMO that is coming out (haven't heard much on it lately; has it been cancelled?) seems to prove that challenge is fully in MMOs: how can the Ring be destroyed (if that's even the time-frame of the game) and yet still be tribulation to keep the 'heroes' needed?

I think what this really calls for is a dynamic story system. Not an automatic story-arc system, but a true story, written by a human writer, but dynamically - his/her story is affected by previous player interaction. This is not to far-fetched, only that someone would constantly come up with new things (but that is more of an imagination issue than one of time or logic).

Say in the beginning of the game, there is the first 'one-solid-evil' and his minions, maybe a Sauron-parallel. His creatures (both the one single-fight-instanced, and the copy-and-paste millions of similar ones) can be defeated until someone finally manages to destroy Mr. Sauron-alike himself. Now for a while (maybe a week, two, etc. in real life) the world is in peace. Still a stray monster here-and-there, and of course the normal animals that everyone likes to kill will remain. Then (where the Writer comes in) out of a 'quest' in that a new monster arises (of course the origin of said monster should be creative, not just "out of the darkness",etc), and maybe the players are set to defeat him, or, defeat this secondary monster that the former asks PCs to help him with. Defeating the first one rids the world again of evil (or a source of it), or if the secondary one(s) is killed, maybe the first could rise to power in the world (because maybe in this story, the second one is actually a 'good-guy').

That above example of making a story both written artistically but at the same time dynamically, wasn't a very good one in terms of writer creativity. But you should be able to see where I'm going with this dynamic/artistic story line system. Maybe even when the players join the game for the first time a year after its start, the past players' actions [and even names] can be used as a sort of history-update for the new-beginner.

The only thing I can see that would make this difficult would be multiple worlds/servers. Each one would have a different history at any given point. Although this allows for uniqueness/customizationism, some people may not like it. I think it wouldnt be bad for each server/world to have a different state-of-being, so that the world represents what kind of players exist in it.a

#50 Getting servers out of sync could be a real problem. If Server A has a bunch of play-18-hours-a-day hardcore gamers they will likely burn through content faster than average. It's not hard to imagine that they could get 3 or 4 "chapters" ahead of the others which puts a lot of strain on the Writers and Content Creators. And if some servers did diverge greatly that would put an even greater strain on the developers.

Even if no diverging occurred, in addition to new story elements, new content would have to be created. Content creation is one of the most expensive parts of game development. Parts of previous "chapters" could be recycled (BadGuy 5 rises to power by awakening the dragons BadGuy 1 used while also binding the hordes that BadGuy 3 used), but a fair bit of new content would be needed so it wasn't the "same old stuff".

Another issue to deal with would be testing/balancing. If the world is evolving constantly how do you test all of this new content before it's implemented?

The "downtime" between chapters of content would have to be interesting and that could be a challenge as well, especially if the game used the standard monthly billing cycle. If I paid for a month of adventure, I expect to get it not to have 2 weeks off in between epics!

Whether or no you have levels, introductory content is required to ease new players in. In current MMOs experienced players go in a destroy newbie areas fairly regularly. It's not a big deal since it will all respawn very quickly.

With a system like the one you propose I also see the Hero problem I mentioned above being even worse. In WoW I get to kill the evil ____. Sure everyone else has to, but at least I did do it. In this one the majority of players would likely not take part in the endgame (timing issues if for no other reason). When people watch/read Lord of the Rings and wish they could take part in something like it, they're wishing they were Aragorn not the footman who stood in ranks behind Gimli.

#51 @ Ted - yes, I do see your point, I was just pointing out that we are in slightly different "paragraphs", but on the "same page" ;-)

@ Ken - In the scenario I outlined above, Trog would indeed be dead, though my intention would not be to have the next Trgo(lodyte =P) step up in Trogs place and continue business as usual - I meant that a decision needs to be made by that group (assuming they live through it) like "Do we flee this land, or do we hunt down Trogs' killer(s) and exact revenge?)

The content would change dynamically, and changes would be permanent... but just imagine being on the run from an organized group of NPC thugs who want to kick your arse. =0

You have, however, hit the nail on the head with regards to the fundamental flaw in MMO's - the tabletop counterparts were designed with four or five players in mind. More than enough room for heroes there.

@ Alan - the problem with human, story generated content, as Ken eluded to a bit, is consumption!

If every action undertaken by any player has permanent and lasting consequences on the world, you'd have to have an unimaginable amount of content prior to launch.

Unfortuantely, even if you generated that content pre-launch, it would'nt take long before you could no longer keep up with the demand for new content post-launch.

Currently, I think the only answer to meaningful content with lasting repercussions is games which use a small playerbase and have a human 'GM" to oversee them - ala: some Neverwinter Nights campaigns and the like.

Getting MMO's to have a more epic "tabletop" feel is a tall, tall order. It can be done - I really believe that, but it's going to be a while. =\

#52

Quote:
@ Ken - In the scenario I outlined above, Trog would indeed be dead, though my intention would not be to have the next Trgo(lodyte =P) step up in Trogs place and continue business as usual - I meant that a decision needs to be made by that group (assuming they live through it) like "Do we flee this land, or do we hunt down Trogs' killer(s) and exact revenge?)

Of course the average player of these sorts of games would see each of Trog's people as a juicy little packet of xp and/or loot, so it would be a miracle if they even left one alive!

I think a game like this would have to have a different scale. Current MMOs are targetting tens of thousands of players per server. I just don't think that's possible with something like this. What about hundreds though? Hero population would be sparser so you wouldn't be tripping over each other.

The issues of content generation and story generation would still be there but at a much more managable level.

Maybe we need a Not-Quite-So-Massively Multiplayer Online Game. It would be a different feeling, but if done well could be closer to the experience most people want from an MMOG.

#53 I've actually often wondered, since my original forays into the world of MMO's, at how feasible a business model it would be to run a single, unified server with a hardcapped population?

Basically, if you scaled your game to accomodate 1000 players (that's content and all, not just simultaneous connection), you would then hardcap the number of possible active accounts at 1000, regardless of how many you expected to be logged in on "average".

Now, on one hand, you could have a much better report with your player-base, as well as respond to their issues in a more timely-manner... theoretically.

In many ways, capping your player-base would be a give-take situation.

For one, managing turn-over would be much more critical and time-consuming... how do you go about it? Waiting lists?

Furthermore, would such a model alienate a large portion of your target audience? How would they respond to the idea that they couldn't activate an account because their were already too many players?

I think a smaller model than what is currently being seen in the MMO industry could go a long way to resolving a myriad of issues... the question then becomes, how would consumers in this "on demand" culture we've created, respond to such a model?

#54 *looks up and reads through here, sticks his overopinionated head in*

I sense a large number here who do not even remotely consider the biggest problem with most of these thoughts. One, at the very end, tossed it out. WoW, for example, had 200000 people playing it simultaniously. The lineage games count happily 3-4 million players interacting in the same worldset. You want to come up with something that can create interesting dymanic quicker than that many mouths can consume it? That can handle quests changing at that speed? That's completely out of grasp. You'd be talking about a computer that is, inevitably, inventing content of a quality level equivilent to a human team but doing it hundreds of thousands of times every hour.

The notice is simple, these things have to be developed and designed and manage to work on a 5-10 person scale. I don't believe anyone's even approached that yet, much less trying to take the solution and generalize it to the million player case. If it can't be made to work fluidly on a 5-10 person scale, then it has no proof of concept even to rightfully go onward and even begin to shake the finger at the MMOs around. I agree quite highly with the NQSMMO thought. From the moment I saw MMOs ages ago, I've assumed they'd go that direction and I feel that they are. Folks want the feeling of being immersed and playing with millions but they don't really want the millions there battling it out with them for the chance to do something of remote importance. Instancing, in general, has always seemed an early step in this direction. Though, being more a small group RP'er than an MMO'er, this could entirely be bias.

MMOs don't have persistentence to the degree talked about here not because MMO developers don't want to press boundaries. I feel pretty certain it's because even the foremost minds currently creating these things don't have a clue how. They're smart. They can, or at least should, be able to see the issues we can see with trying to fling these in. They therefore likely try and work on solutions, but then those have their own problems. These problems aren't simple. They aren't the type of things they sit down, have a beer, and poof, it works right and can manage to be conveyed effectively while still managing hundreds of thousands of people. At the moment, I'd suggest that while there's plenty of boundaries to push, new ways to do things, the dream of endless dynamic content that's maintainable for any reasonably fesiable rate of cost (aka, not in the trillions to have thousands of devs trying to do it) with millions of people tossing it through it's paces at breakneck speeds is nothing more than that...a dream.
(split)

#55 As just another aside, to the folks wishing for permadeath? Good luck. I'd never play that game and I think that holds for the vast majority of the current market, but it may be interesting to spot what gets produced anyway. My thoughts on such are very simple:
The larger the effort devoted to a certain character, the less the average player will tolerate the character being obliterated. It may be dramatic, it may be exciting, but more often than not, the second it happens, the player is gone from the world and not paying the fees anymore. Games get away with permadeath in action games that take 1-10 hours to do. Folks constantly on RPG dev sites toss out the suggestion that permadeath will go well with 50-150 hour mostly on rail RPGs. These ignore the fact that a player will be more than willing to repeat a few hours work and won't usually be willing to repeat 20-30 hours work. I do not think in an MMO that has 'death' as any occurence that is likely to occur (which tends to go with the hostile environments) and includes detailed character creation AND months of character development as flagmarks of the game that permanent death would go well. This wouldn't be because of a resistance to change (though that'd play a part) but because, among other reasons, the time to return to the type of thing they were doing is too overwhelming. Yes, this marks on other problems with the genre that are in definite placement for pushing boundaries but the guy who died heroically taking on the elder dragon of Kharoth is unlikely to want to go back to stabbing rats. Even the heavy role players would likely promptly look for another world to stay in. Especially when you consider that 'dying' tends to involve being brutally ripped from all the folks you like to play with unless they're all starting over again too.

#56

Quote:You want to come up with something that can create interesting dymanic quicker than that many mouths can consume it? That can handle quests changing at that speed? That's completely out of grasp. You'd be talking about a computer that is, inevitably, inventing content of a quality level equivilent to a human team but doing it hundreds of thousands of times every hour.

In general, I agree. However, in specific, I disagree on some points...

- As a matter of application, we only need to be able to generate more interesting content than is generated now, which is still not going to approach a writer's skill at storytelling. Prose is, I agree, a very longways off. But possible improvements are not.

- I don't think that generated missions are done hundreds of thousands of times an hour now. Probably hundreds of times an hour, which is quite acceptable if the server architecture supports it(obviously, WoW can, or there would be loads of bad press about it). Remember that of all the subscribers, only a certain amount are online at a time. Out of those, some will be already on missions, some getting them generated, and some doing miscellaneous stuff.

One of the things that more interesting and longer missions do is decrease the amount of missions that are generated, since these missions would be somewhat more complex. I don't mean DaVinci Code complex, but still more complex than "This rat is terrorizing our village... kill 20 and we'll give you a bag of gold" ;) So, if for the sake of argument the current "tasks" generated take about 30 minutes to complete, and we implement a way to generate missions that take 1-2 hours to complete, then the player is spending 200-400% more time on missions, lowering the frequency of having them generated. Of course, that also has to balance with the increased server load of generating more complex missions, but with today's servers, I can see them holding their own with hundreds of "more complex" missions an hour.

But all this does, and all it's designed to do is push back that point where the player says "this is all the same". In current MMO's, that point comes up very quickly, and there's no way to hand-write missions in volume to offset that.

#57 Another facet of MMO's that tends to be problematic is economy.

Ironically, it was in considering the issue of amplified inflation that I came to the conclusion of motive based AI driving the game.

The core problem, as I see it, is that players are essentially afforded an effectively unlimited faucet, if you will, or a method through which they can generate an unlimited amount of cash - whether it be gold or just generic "credits".

The reason this is a huge problem is that with the introduction of each and every new monetary unit, each previously existing monetary unit is devalued to some degree.

Some developers have attempted to tackle this issue by creating extensive money sinks - i.e. maintenance on structures and items, upkeep of gear, etc.

The reason this doesn't work so well IMO is that players, by their very nature, tend to horde; cash, weapons, collectibles, miscellaneous items, you name it.

The end result is each player attempting to mass as much wealth as possible while minimizing their "overhead" and only spending large sums of cash in calculated expenditures.

Believe it or not, this runs more rampant in online games than you might think.

My thought was to introduce a finite amount of cash into the game world, thus ensuring that the value of each individual monetary unit would be *somewhat* stable.

In order to make such an economy move and flow, you'd need high level "entities", like corporations who would drive economic movement. Essentially, it's the motive engine operating at a higher level.

If this was taken a bit deeper, you could even assign each entity the ability to generate missions. A good example would be to track inventories of craftable goods.

Let's say the "entity" Garson & Sons is a clothier. There primary motive is to make and sell clothes to obtain a profit (which is drawn from a finite supply). In support of this, they require a given reserve of textiles, hides and other goods that make there products possible.

Garson & Sons, as an entity unto itself would then generate 'bounty' style missions that would pay players for pelts, etc.

Of course, that all gets pretty static and redundant very quickly, which led me to the conclusion of Trog.

Granted, it's a very lofty goal, but nothing is *technically* impossible, just improbable. =)

#58 Not technically impossible, but you'd have to modify a good deal of other things to make it fesiable. The american economy, to link to real world 'MMO' considerations, is hardly static. It is in a constant state of flux with several things influencing the value of currency and items. If you tried to put a static limit at, let's say, 1920s level money amount, you'd run into problems as the population exponetially increased over the next 80 years beyond that (and this would be a year in MMO terms). Eventually, one unit of money would become more valuable then certain low cost newbie items. In which case, newbies would never be able to acquire the money to get stuff with. Can this be fixed? Yes. But it's a domino effect. In the end, trying to swat at small parts of the MMO current 'primary design' is almost fruitless. Those who are working from the roots up with the lessons learned from them are far more likely to churn out something that doesn't end up as a disaster.

Ted:

Yeah, I'm not saying there aren't plenty of areas to improve, so much as the 'let's make an infinite working setup here' isn't really going to happen. It's a pipedream.

There's lots of very valid other ways that can be traveled without accepting a premise that such is needed. There's also a lot that can continue to be done along the lines of improving down that chain, even if I feel heading in other directions will end up being more fruitful long term in providing the insights towards making persistent worlds.

#59 Adding new quests and getting rid of older ones (when they become obsolete because of the current state of the 'story') in realtime might be a server stress. Instead, if more creativity could be given to each 'chapter' or 'story generation' so that much more time is taken before it is accomplished (although this isn't completely bad, try not to simply use high-level monsters as a means to make these story-objectives difficult: zelda-ish or the like-puzzles would be interesting, maybe sometimes the story-objective could lead players to a temple area...), the writer has enough time two write the next branch of the story (there'd need to be an odd amount, if two outcomes, then a sort of compromise one in the middle is the third) for what happens next.
Example:
A giant spider has been discovered deep in a cave. It's offspring are attacking all nearby cities. 'Quest-giver' type NPCs tell players that they need to destroy the spider itself, so that it can stop producing eggs. However, another, maybe shadier, NPC tells players that there is a deep nest of eggs that aren't to hatch in a long time (this could be an actual time limit, or not having one - NPC says it will happen soon just to add suspence), and that they are all within this giant, ancient temple. He also says that inside the temple is an archaic machine that, when activated, can destroy all the eggs. The first two objectives have been set - Destroy the Queen directly and then go after the eggs, or destroy the eggs witih the machine. The branches would be -
A)Kill the Queen first - If the eggs are not destroyed within [number] hours after the queen, some of the [monstername]-people discover the underground machine and begin to use it to control the remaining offspring.
B)Destroy the eggs first - If the Queen is not killed within [number] hours after the eggs are destroyed, the Queen retreats to the machine-room and begins re-establishing the egg quantities, and now there is an increased amount of lower spiders guarding that room.
C)(Compromise) Kill Queen and destroy eggs within [number] hours of each other. This is the best possible outcome, and the machine is also destroyed to prevent future use of it by malicious beings.

Instead of that being the only thing going on, that could just be one story, say the Spider-Story (^^). While players are waiting for the next chapter to present itself in that story (of course it shouldnt seem like that - more organic so that it just seems more realistic than "the temple is frozen while the writers work"), other storys are still active and concluding and branching, like the Airship-Story where players must find out why the airships keep getting destroyed so soon into their flight (just made up stuff, but you get the idea..). Dont think of it in one wave of quests presenting themselves, then the first player to complete it entirely is the last as well, because there can be multiple stories that are going on. And if you make the chapters challenging enough (again, not by relying entirely on high-level monsters from keeping players from the objective, but also puzzles or more intellectual challenges), then the writers should have enough time to produce the next possible branches. This dynamic-quest system would make strategy guides inconsistent and hard to make.
I personally would like to make a game that's near impossible to put all aspects into a guide, especially if its because the game is so customizable (both through character and world influences).

#60

Quote:Not technically impossible, but you'd have to modify a good deal of other things to make it fesiable. The american economy, to link to real world 'MMO' considerations, is hardly static. It is in a constant state of flux with several things influencing the value of currency and items. If you tried to put a static limit at, let's say, 1920s level money amount, you'd run into problems as the population exponetially increased over the next 80 years beyond that (and this would be a year in MMO terms).

This is valid, though not as much an issue if you take into consideration my previous suggestion, i.e. limited or "hard capped" server populations.

Basically, your population wouldn't grow, so that aspect of inflationary economics becomes moot, does it not?